


when I want to dance

by incandescens



Category: Elisabeth - Levay/Kunze
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:15:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incandescens/pseuds/incandescens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To have a choice is to be able to say no, but also to be able to say yes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when I want to dance

Elisabeth acknowledged no equal in the world except Death.

It was her fall as a child – yes, barely a woman, still very much a girl – that made her understand the power that Death held. Her parents could not have stopped it, her father could not have saved her, none of the gathered crowd of family and friends and doctors could have done the least little _thing_ to help her. There was nothing in the world except her and Death. They were the only two who had any say in the matter.

She remembered the fall. She didn’t remember hitting the ground. She remembered waking in her bedroom, with her mother grasping her hands so tightly that there were bruises afterwards.

How strange it had been, to think that she now had something private, something which was separate from her family and her parents. Something they could never touch.

It – no, he – became her private refuge. There was always the choice at the back of her mind, and the knowledge that she could take it if she wanted to. A path to real, perfect freedom, where nobody could claim to own her. 

_Behold, all flesh is as the grass, and all the flower of flesh is as the flower of grass..._ Her life was fragile. Death held her in his hand every minute of the day. 

She rode breakneck at the head of the hunt, she starved herself for the sake of her beauty, she laughed in his face and he smiled back at her and let her go. He did not take her. He would not take her. She gambled herself with every chance, and that was power, that was _freedom_. Nobody else would ever understand that. Nobody else would ever share it with her.

What had it been like, that second when her body struck the ground and she nearly died? Had there been pain? Was that why she couldn’t remember it? 

Or had there, she wondered, turning the thought over and over in her mind, had there been a sudden swooping consummation? An embrace? The swift ecstatic shattering of a boundary between life and the darkness beyond?

She looked at herself in the mirror, seeing past the fluttering maids as they arranged her hair and sewed her into her dress, seeing the shadows that crowded behind her. Of course Death would watch her from the shadows. In the mirror. In the darkness. On the edge of choices, as sharp as the edge of steel or broken glass. This was a private arrangement between them. Nobody else was allowed to be involved.

She could walk into his arms at this very moment. 

Of course, she wasn’t going to. But she _could_.

Her placid reflected eyes watched her from her perfectly calm reflected face. She imagined the pale hand reaching out to take hers, the rushing overmastering darkness, the shattering liberation and separation and breaking of all bonds, the _freedom_...

The thought ran hot in her veins.

She set it aside. _Not today_ , she told herself. _I do not need to. I can choose not to. I will not._

He would be waiting for her, the moment that she said _yes_. She toyed with the thought of that choice, that acceptance, that release.

But for the moment, she would say _no_ , and he would have to wait a little longer to embrace her.

Her choice. Always, her choice. That final power was hers, and nobody could take it away from her.


End file.
